Company: eDrinkit.com
Website: www.eDrinkit.com
Founders: Omid Sabet and Alex Roizen
Headquarters: San Diego, California
Year Founded: 2011
Facebook: www.facebook.com/edrinkit
Brief Company Description: “eDrinkit.com features deals specifically focused on nightlife and entertainment. Our customers enjoy discounts of 50-90 percent off drinks, VIP bottle service, cover charge, private transportation, wine/brewery tours and fun vacations to places like Cabo San Lucas.”
By Omid Sabet and Alex Roize, co-founders
Product Overview
Founded in 2011, eDrinkit.com was created to assist venues in promoting their business, while providing customers with deals to popular nightclubs, bars and restaurants. The company offers customers discounts of 50-90 percent off drinks, VIP bottle service, cover charge, as well as other deals for social activities, including private transportation, wine tours and vacations. The company is located in San Diego and will soon be expanding to additional cities in California, as well as Nevada and Arizona.
Founders’ Story
We founded eDrinkit was in January 2011. We are longtime friends and classmates (UCSD class of 2003- Go Tritons!) who also have nine years of work experience together, owning and operating our first venture, SFiNX Entertainment (www.sfinx.com). Founded in 2002, SFiNX quickly established itself as a prominent source of entertainment and events for the San Diego bar and club scene. Nine years of database and relationship building in the San Diego nightlife realm spawned into the creation of eDrinkit in early 2010. Companies such as Groupon and Living Social were growing at unprecedented rates in an economic environment that couldn’t even pay its bills, literally! We saw this as an opportune time to leverage the hard-earned SFiNX connections to give the slow and dismal Southern California market what they needed most—a drink at 50 percent off! With the other members of the management team, eDrinkit.com is comprised of more than 40 years of hospitality experience in the bar and nightclub business out of San Diego and Las Vegas.
Marketing/Promotion Strategy
Our promotional strategy is our ‘secret sauce’ and if we told you, well, we’d have to make you an owner. But we assure you, our combined two decades experience in the entertainment and nightlife space has given us a pretty good idea of how to get the right deals to the right people in the right amount of time.
Our Technology
eDrinkit encourages our patrons to check the site often, as new deals are released constantly in each of our six categories (Drinks, VIP Bottles, Excursions, Tours, Restaurants and Other). Our user interface is extremely simple and you don’t have to sign up to see our deals. We are currently working on releasing our iPhone app, which will make it even easier for customers to buy our deals and have other surprises in the works to make redemption easy and discrete for your next date!
Social Networking
Whether you’re a Facebookaholic (I might have just made this up) or a tweeter, you can share our deals with your network and get rewarded for it! Friends are always sharing music, pictures and funny videos and other stuff they think their friends will find relevant on Facebook, but nothing is more relevant to 20 somethings then enjoying cheap drinks and partying with their friends, which make our social promotions a natural fit for every user. You probably won’t share that Brazilian wax deal you bought from that other site on your page, but you most definitely will share the deal from the hottest nightclub you know your friends will also enjoy!
How We Differentiate from the Competition
We focus specifically on the liquor and entertainment space. By concentrating on this niche and partnering with the right affiliates, we attract an exclusive demographic of clientele that is very appealing to bars, clubs and restaurants. Our desirable database, unique marketing strategy and very demographic specific deal specials separate us from the pack.
Business Model
Very simple. We take a percentage of every ‘deal’ we sell to our clients; the rest goes to the merchant. In addition, we receive payment for advertisement and other event related deals we help promote concurrently.
Current Needs
We are currently in the process of raising our first round of capital, which will allow us to expand to new cities, optimize our site and sleep, maybe.
eDrinkIt – www.edrinkit.com
